Killing Cass Lake — Full Documentary

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: okay here's my block and wesley lived here we'll take him out um his wife had non-cancerous brain tumors there's us two cases of breast cancer there's will and annie ellison she had breast cancer and her boy died of brain tumors six cases of cancer and one case of non-cancerous brain tumors and basically one block that's a little high of me [00:00:37] Laura Wadston: my name is laura wadston i'm an investigative reporter at hunter brook media and i grew up 80 miles from cast lake minnesota when our team stumbled upon alarming mortality data so close to home it was the first i'd ever heard of the toxic superfund site right in the middle of town hunterbrook investigated to find out why the area remains so polluted more than 40 years after the danger was discovered what we found was a story of corporate neglect in indian country at the center is a 20 billion dollar corporation the self-proclaimed global leader in sustainable packaging solutions but behind the green slogans lurks a much darker reality and a tribal community fighting for their way of [00:01:23] Speaker 3: life there's a game that's being played out there you know with money and all that stuff and a lot of these sites should have been cleaned up decades ago [00:01:45] Laura Wadston: this is never before seen footage from a documentary that never got finished [00:01:51] Speaker 4: with this this area of yummy and frame yeah okay look at least halfway respectable here [00:02:09] Speaker 5: you'd never know this used to be a neighborhood there were houses here families people who live their [00:02:15] Speaker 6: whole lives on this ground now there's just a field downtown has become kind of a ghost town [00:02:24] Speaker 7: we had a garden but nothing would grow the stuff would come up and they just wilt [00:02:32] Speaker 5: i grew up south of the tracks that neighborhood the south side that's where everyone i love lived my my family's house my grandparents house the kids i played with you didn't need to go anywhere else [00:02:45] Speaker 1: everything was right there i don't think any of this was ever really covered in depth by any news [00:02:52] Speaker 8: paper tv anything until now these people are just a salt of their hard-working people yet they're all dead [00:03:07] Laura Wadston: 200 miles north of the twin cities in the heart of minnesota's north woods and the chippewa national forest sits the small town of cast lake wheeler lumber bridge and supply company operated a wood treatment plant just south of the tracks in cast lake from 1957 until 1985. they used large pressurized cylinders to treat telephone poles fence posts and railroad ties with creosote and pentachlorophenol to keep the wood from rotting the epa designated the former wheeler plant a superfund site in 1984 adding it to the list of the most contaminated places in the country the statute's called the [00:03:48] Speaker 9: comprehensive environmental response compensation liability act or circle up but it's also called superfund because congress decided that the types of industries that are most associated with superfund sites got levied a very small tax on their proceeds between the taxpayer and the company that made a profit polluting make the polluter pay right what if there's no polluter what if we can't find it well we're going to dip into this fund that's going to have all this money in it and that's going to be able to pay for the cleanup or if we have a prp that is recalcitrant and won't work with us epa could dip into the fund clean that site up then take the prp to court and present the bill and say this is how much it cost [00:04:35] Laura Wadston: your honor make them pay us when i visited the town last summer i learned most of the people who lived in cast lake when the plant was operating were already dead that's when we found leo anderson's 20-year-old [00:04:49] Speaker 5: documentary trailer on youtube this area as you can see here there's pieces of contaminated soil [00:04:57] Laura Wadston: leo isn't a professional filmmaker he had no prior experience when he felt compelled to buy a camera and start recording what his family and neighbors were going through [00:05:08] Speaker 10: how'd that sound i don't know sound like matter or whatever huh sound matter or whatever like this is new chris this is bullshit is that the way i sounded no i mean you should sound like more like that [00:05:23] Laura Wadston: on new voiceovers too leo's documentary never got finished neither did the cleanup this is also a story of environmental justice cast lake and the superfund site are located on the leech [00:05:39] Speaker 8: lake band of ojibway reservation now that used to be a swamp the indians lived in little high places of land that they'd build their shacks when wheelers came in they filled it so that right next to the railroad they could have their plat they went higher indies and the indians that worked there had to have some sort of friendship with somebody to get in there we got no benefit and we got all the uh heart [00:06:03] Speaker 11: so it has to do with with racism it's a whole long history the settlers want the land for taxation and we're in the way they come in here with the logging industry and then they want to cut down the trees pollute things they move on and they did that all across the country [00:06:23] Laura Wadston: the plant polluted soil water and air with dioxins arsenic and other toxic chemicals [00:06:31] Speaker 8: they had these giant cheapies that they were wearing their waste with it they take their waste water from their pressure treating system and spray it on the ground and then they would pile their walks out everywhere so you got the day piles of freshly treated extremely hot logs oh yeah there were [00:06:50] Speaker 12: we had a great big bull pile there really oh sure it must have been 30 40 footers yeah that's what i [00:06:56] Laura Wadston: didn't like wheelers would stack the treated logs right next to people's homes according to local residents this was a tactic to get people to sell their properties so wheelers could expand i knew there were [00:07:10] Speaker 12: three houses over there and i just kept waiting but then the wesley swanson's one and charlie swanson's went and then joe's place went and i said i've got to get out of here that's all there's to it well he made me an offer right after battle i took it just six or six thousand dollars to get on there [00:07:27] Speaker 13: i wanted to get out of there but i intended to live there the rest of my life really my husband worked there for 17 years until he was uh 57 years old and he couldn't take it anymore i can remember one time it was on the fourth of july and he told me he had to work that day they had him crawling in the cylinders to clean them out because he was a small person who was still wet and dripping on his clothes you [00:07:52] Speaker 14: know we could smell dad all day long and that smell was so bad you had you could try to keep the windows closed in the summertime because it was so bad the wind was blowing just a certain way would come in your house you make your food taste that way and when i go out in the morning when i was a younger kid [00:08:12] Speaker 15: there'd be this this gray powder and it was like flower really yeah and my mom never left the clothes hang out overnight you know she'd always take them down because it that stuff would get on there you know and then as she's taking down the clothes you know because it's it's flying out this ash is flying [00:08:29] Speaker 13: out all the time we never knew there was any danger no one told us you know it's like boozy [00:08:39] Speaker 16: i have what you call uh ankylosing spondylitis which is uh arthritis of the spine i've had this disease since i was 17. i've learned that it has to do with your immune system that's one of the things that dioxin and so forth can affect i heard that when you die of cancer the pain gets such that it's almost like another presence in the room it's it's just i really like to think about it it's kind of dirty you know why i'll clean it up because it's easier to play oh yeah that way it's like my little spot here do you want me from the side [00:09:37] Speaker 13: i have a daughter that was born to three kidneys my sister nancy she had cancer and my brother died [00:09:43] Speaker 1: of cancer of the brain you talk to somebody and you start telling you yeah you know so-and-so's got this and so on and then you start thinking gee that seems high that seems an awful lot at such a young [00:09:56] Speaker 7: age a lot of people that have died down there i would say eight out of ten people died from cancer [00:10:03] Speaker 8: i worked for the esoteric pollution control agency and i was sent up to investigate a complaint at the wheeler st regis site and so i took pictures and wrote a report minnesota pollution control then took enforcement action against saint regis and when the tipi burners were ordered to cease then they took it to the cast lake dump which of course is right where the indians lived and they burned it in pits the tar pits [00:10:31] Speaker 1: icky old tar picks that the tar was thickened and if an animal got caught in it he was signed his own death warrant he didn't get out birds there was always birds in there covered with tar dying you [00:10:46] Speaker 17: know there's little balls of tar laying on i say let's use that for my gum the tar ball tasting good yes it tasted good [00:10:58] Laura Wadston: the exposure ran through every part of their daily lives [00:11:02] Speaker 5: my family's wild water had a rainbow on the surface an oily film we thought it was just how water looked children were playing in contaminated ponds after it rained we had no idea what the plant was doing to us [00:11:17] Speaker 18: especially if you we boiled it made tea you could actually see the feel really yeah and we didn't think nothing you know we just thought well maybe it's a dirty cup or whatever we got an earth wind [00:11:31] Speaker 7: and they blew that creosote on top of the water and every time the minerals would swim up from the bottom they just turn over dead mom had seventeen hundred dollars worth of animals in those tanks lost them all i was so heavy when she had no money to bring a shoot against them for that and they [00:11:52] Laura Wadston: would have fought it anyway the plant operated for 28 years the cleanup 42 years and counting creosote pentachlorophenol dioxins and pahs are all classified by the epa and world health organization as known or probable human carcinogens burning the treated wood sent toxins airborne and supposedly they've cleaned up [00:12:16] Speaker 4: this whole area but as we're walking up here you'll see this stuff here [00:12:26] Speaker 19: which is creosote i lived in cass lake on the east side really just a few hundred yards from the superfund site for a few years human beings are complex and we are impacted by so many things the food we eat whether we exercise or not but also by things in our environment so while looking at the long-term effects of the superfund site it is sometimes difficult to isolate variables when you kind of zoom out and look at what is happening with native populations broadly and compare to what's going on in cass lake there seems to be a pretty strong correlation [00:13:10] Laura Wadston: across 13 years of minnesota death records cast lake stood out the life expectancy is 17 years younger than the average minnesotan half of cass lake is gone before the age of 65. across minnesota that's closer to one in five and of all superfund sites across the state of minnesota cass lake is the community that dies youngest [00:13:35] Speaker 19: the superfund site had tremendous cascading impacts on people's ability to practice their culture these too have reverberations on people's health it just feels like no matter what you do it's waiting for you [00:13:52] Speaker 5: i've had cancer surgery myself you grew up thinking is this it is this how it ends for all of us [00:14:00] Laura Wadston: it's hard to conclusively prove that any single death was caused by the contamination directly cass lake is a poor community and poverty shortens lives it's also predominantly native and other reservations in minnesota without a superfund site also experience health disparities but that's kind of the point the people and places that get poisoned forgotten and ignored are far too often poor and native [00:14:25] Speaker 20: i may be old and cynical but the truth of it is you know if this was edina it would be cleaned up [00:14:33] Laura Wadston: but it's not and so well if it was edina it never would have happened edina is a wealthy predominantly white suburb of minneapolis it's the poster child of privilege for minnesotans the rest of the state refers to people from edina as cake eaters throughout time since there have been humans living [00:14:57] Speaker 19: there since the retreat of the last glaciers 12 000 years ago people have been relying upon the food that is geoproximate to cast lake to feed their families if you are economically disadvantaged and you are using wild rice to help feed your family or to sell it to to the tribe to make money then it is much more difficult for you to pack up your bags and go 100 miles away to harvest the wild rice so it becomes cost prohibitive to carry on that cultural practice because the band has jurisdiction over its reservation [00:15:37] Laura Wadston: they've implemented their own environmental protection policies with standards that are higher than the federal minimum and in 2024 the epa formally approved the band's more stringent standards under the clean [00:15:49] Speaker 11: water act i want to remind everybody that's not bba that is responsible for what happened there [00:16:04] Laura Wadston: there is a corporate citizen and his international paper international paper came to own the site through a series of mergers and acquisitions from wheelers to saint regis then champion international and finally international paper in the year 2000 over the years international paper has argued that cleanup should not be held to the band's higher standards if we leave it to the epa if we leave [00:16:32] Speaker 21: it to the international paper company we're just going to get another band-aid how long will those rice [00:16:38] Speaker 22: beds be there what's wrong with our fish and when are we going to stop having two or three funerals a week to see each other and now we have to deal with communities being exposed to environmental racism and [00:16:51] Speaker 23: we've got to stand up as hard as we all are you know i was wondering is it going to happen to my kids and it did but you know it's really very possible that it comes from that contaminated site [00:17:07] Laura Wadston: to be clear international paper did not own the site when the wood treatment plant was running and polluting the area but the company assumed cleanup responsibility when it acquired the polluters and it's been in charge of remediation for the past 26 years [00:17:23] Speaker 11: the last attorneys that i was talking to was international paper he would call me up and threaten me and say that i had no right to talk about the site because i wasn't knowledgeable i wasn't a scientist the lawyer for international paper yeah just want to show you the some of the femstop areas to say you [00:17:44] Laura Wadston: know posted no trespassing keep out in the course of reporting this story hunterbrook repeatedly reached out to international paper hoping to hear their perspective they never responded but in our interviews residents former employees of the leech lake band and experts described the company's strategy for dealing with its cleanup obligations first buy the land not because you want to live there but to control it then bulldoze the home and put a fence around the plot then try to convince regulators that the fence itself is sufficient harm reduction step three resist testing at all costs because more sampling means more proof that the contamination still persists and four is delay wait long enough and the problem will start to solve itself because the other side will run out of money and the people who remember [00:18:35] Speaker 24: they'll start to die off we would do very minimal sampling because they would delay delay delay fight in 2008 there's a bible literature but my left was maybe a problem this spy and bulldoze strategy hollowed out [00:18:51] Laura Wadston: the town of cast lake economically my grandmother's house was right there my aunt's house there a few [00:18:58] Speaker 5: years after she sold international paper to pay for her cancer treatments the house was gone demolished and then the next one and then the next one until the whole neighborhood just wasn't there anymore [00:19:13] Speaker 6: my name is rob aiken i run leech lake financial services and we're one of the few non-profits in the area that's focusing on community development and over the years what's happened is the superfund site has continually come up time and time again as an obstacle as a barrier for us to do meaningful community development to reach this population that's so in need of help and services there used to be a [00:19:43] Speaker 25: lot of homes in that area but now people aren't putting homes anywhere they're demolishing homes as people have passed on because why would anybody want to live on a contaminated area homes flattened [00:19:54] Laura Wadston: small businesses shuttered families scattered today international paper owns nearly 60 percent of parcels on the superfund site and this superfund site is about a quarter of all the land in cast lake but after all these years and all the pushback from international paper the band and local residents continue to resist attempts to provide a subpar cleanup when leo picked up a camera he preserved the one thing international paper couldn't buy up or bulldoze the town's memory the community took international paper to court twice both cases were settled for undisclosed amounts [00:20:34] Speaker 26: it was my opinion that they were trying to set a precedent and maybe control this one because it had a lower standard due to the tribal standards for allowable pollution the depositions were not friendly the [00:20:47] Speaker 11: longer it can be drawn out uh people die and then you lose your evidence i don't have to prove the loss because growing up over there we we experienced the sickness and you have family that died like from for me it was my brother and then my sister and my daughter they kept fighting just this summer work [00:21:17] Laura Wadston: crews began soil sampling to figure out how deep the contamination goes and plan how much soil will need to be excavated so the land can be safely reused one remediation measure in place is a pump and treat groundwater system it's been running since 1987 it may need to continue operating until at least 2051. the epa recently formed a community advisory group and consults with the leech lake band throughout the superfund process the agency told us that it's evaluating whether existing remedies are sufficient and expects soil cleanup in the former neighborhood to last until at least the early 2030s the site is still a huge obstacle for the community the contamination has depressed property values and it's challenging to draw in outside developers or get bank loans approved when you don't have comparable properties to support an appraisal an international paper has argued that the former neighborhood next to the railroad tracks should be reclassified from residential to industrial industrial use has less stringent cleanup standards meanwhile the community faces a housing shortage here's the thing though this site can still be cleaned the town can still be rebuilt i think that's what the perfect picture looks like [00:22:32] Speaker 6: right is the polluters are held accountable and help this community get to where it can go and a lot of [00:22:38] Speaker 19: us think the sky is the limit here you can't give the years back to people who got sick from this but restorative justice would be an effort to restore some of the things that were damaged by this practice that would include robust funding for indigenous language revitalization stabilization and revitalization of traditional harvest practices and help revitalize the ecosystem that won't fix everything that went wrong but it gives you a way to move forward with dignity and humanity and responsibility [00:23:17] Laura Wadston: this place is still poisoned the community paid the price when will the bill come due for international paper [00:23:36] Speaker 16: you know that's my favorite lake in the whole world pike bay the waves talk to me and it's where my mind don't go when i die because it's just such a beautiful place just listen that's where the migratory birds [00:23:51] Speaker 11: they fly over the wings flapping and then the wind is blowing and it's just amazing all the life down there [00:24:00] Speaker 5: i live in a community about 20 minutes away now and the amount of people who don't even know that this has existed is is way too high we got a feeling like if i don't document this this is just going to go away you know no one that's ever going to see what's really happening here are you guys going to be scraping this off today or probably not today you know and i worked on it for a year or two and then um you know and then uh yeah i just i stopped because the people you know the people in that i was interviewing you know they're they're important to me and they [00:24:49] Laura Wadston: no it's stupid to make you no oh my gosh don't don't apologize at all this is well you know [00:24:56] Speaker 5: it's one thing when you you know you you grieve someone but when you're listening to their words [00:25:02] Laura Wadston: and trying to you know cut you know edit something oh my gosh yeah so it was too difficult to keep too raw [00:25:15] Speaker 16: this was supposed to be the dream house for my family it's just one of the most beautiful lakes in the whole world and they just polluted it like nothing because it didn't mean a damn thing to them it means a lot to me and i would have liked to have been able to have my children and my children's children come down and enjoy it the way i did when i was a kid [00:26:06] Speaker ?: Thank you.